After several failed attempts, we finally managed to get Chris Pocock to our club to present to us. Chris is a local person who was born and bred in Wiltshire and has a great love for his home county. The ‘Wiltshire Project’ idea came about whilst chatting with a colleague over a drink and developed into a challenge between Chris and his colleague – Eva to see who could take the best hundred pictures of Wiltshire. Unfortunately Eva wasn’t able to co-present with Chris as she had returned to her home in Slovakia so we never got her insights into the challenges presented.

After detailed research, and the purchase of many Ordnance Survey maps, Chris and Eva selected a number of locations to visit and take photographs capturing local life and scenery. Each location was visited only once and often the whole day and into the evening was spent exploring the nooks and crannies of the location, trying to optimise subjects and conditions for photography.

The project was completed prior to the first lockdown which provided the opportunity to spend time selecting the images and compiling the presentation which also included interesting facts about the county itself as well as the locations visited.

Throughout the presentation, the locations selected and their images, some of which were taken from a light aircraft, both Chris and Eva revealed a personal insight into the parts of the county that are special to them.

Our tabletop photography evening had a definite water theme across all its activities and no-one got wet in the process. Jon organised a simple but effective set to photograph water droplets, which was the most challenging task of the evening.  But it proved to be both enjoyable and rewarding with several participants trying their skills at firing the flash at the optimum time to freeze the action at the critical moment.

Martin dusted down some of his lighting equipment and set up a profesional display to photograph soap bubbles. Apart from mixing a soap solution that allowed the bubbles to remain stable for sufficient time to capture their ever changing patterns and colours, getting a highly diffused lighting source was the key to success.  A speedlight, reflector umbrell and large white reflector proved key to success.

Water droplet refraction images were attempted with a simple set up using empty beer cans to support a pane of glass, positioned above a computer tablet to generate the master image. The key skill here was to produce discreet spherical droplets that would act like a miniature lens and retain their shape. Eventually we resorted to using pure glycerin which did the trick

It was pleasing to see some fresh faces attend the meeting and join in with the activities.

Our annual battle with Cricklade Camera Club entered its fourth year and was hosted at The Town Hall Annexe in Cricklade. Each Club entered 30 Open subject images and Peter Markwick, a judge from the Southern Counties Photographic Federation had the challenging task of critiquing and scoring each image.

Club members who made the journey on a cold and rainy night were rewarded with a victory for RWBCC by 555 points versus 543.5 points. It was a high scoring evening by the judge and seven of our images were awarded the maximum score of 20 points, which is a great achievement and congratulations to those involved.

So , after four battles with Cricklade CC we stand at 2 wins apiece and rivalries will be renewed in Spring 2023 and hosted by us.